What Bugs Parents the Most

Alignment remains an issue for many independent and international schools. We know this from the hundreds of focus groups we do with thousands of parents and teachers as preparation for leading a strategic planning exercise. Lack of vertical and horizontal alignment is the single most frequent complaint parents have about such schools. Except that they usually don’t say “alignment;” rather, what they talk about are division-to-division and teacher-to-teacher inconsistencies.

To illustrate, they tell us about how the language program regresses at least a year between middle school and upper school, or that one 6th grade algebra teacher can cover much more material than the other.  Or they talk about differences in disciplinary expectations between the coaches of two varsity sports, or about how what seems to matter most in lower school evaporates in middle school. No one expects teachers to be identical, but they do expect students to have equivalent learning experiences, and they do expect, say, the math program to be a relatively smooth ramp from fundamentals to IB or AP calculus.

We usually receive a defensive reaction when we mention this to school people, especially to mid-level administrators and teachers. The virtue of teacher autonomy that goes with independence becomes a vice when overdone. For parents, inconsistency is a product defect, not a design feature. Heads, often, are frustrated by this but feel powerless to force closer alignment over teacher opposition.

We are looking for stories of schools that have addressed horizontal and vertical alignment in a way that is achieving success. Not just curriculum mapping—everyone does something like that—but the actual application of the map to help new teachers know what they must do to be successful at the school. Let us know and we will be in touch to do an interview.